Fast Increment Registers

We give an optimal wait free implementation of an increment register An increment register is a concurrent object consisting of an integer valued register with an increment operation that atomically increments the register and returns the previous value We implement this register in a synchronous message passing model with crash failures In our implementation an increment operation halts in O log c rounds of communication where c is the number of concurrently executing increment operations This is the rst wait free implementation of any object that matches the log c lower bound by Herlihy and Tuttle for wait free implementations and it proves that their lower bound is tight The signi cance of our result is not so much the implementation itself but what it says about lower bounds Our result says that log c is the best possible lower bound that applies to so many objects in so many models The algorithm itself is interesting however because it is based on an optimal solution for strong renaming a simple decision problem used by Herlihy and Tuttle to prove their lower bound